This entry in the Amadeus blogathon comes from filmmaker Matthew Wilder.
The Eighties were a rough time to come of age as a movie
lover. Almost all the good stuff snuck in through the back door. Brazil, Blade
Runner, Once Upon a Time in America, The King of Comedy, Southern Comfort, King
Lear, Do the Right Thing; the only great moviemaker in that era pulling up to a
VIP parking space and whistling while he worked was Steven Spielberg. It bums
me out now when today’s retro-minded hipsters go to a revival joint and Get
That Eighties Feeling, putting on their rainbow-colored wrist-sweat-bands and
covering their torsos in fake Rubik’s Cubes, watching crapola like Legend and
Labyrinth and Willow and Just One of the Guys and Lost Boys and Goonies and
Satisfaction and—well, all the shit people at the time were cringing through to
get to the good stuff. That’s what’s now called “the Eighties.”
One movie that bridged the gap between the high-minded and
the genuinely popular was Milos Forman’s Amadeus. Smart teenagers of the time
dug it. The gibes against it were obvious. First and foremost, it was
“middlebrow”—an adjective John Simon, Andrew Sarris, Stanley Kauffmann and La
Pauline could all agree upon. Based on a play by Peter Shaffer (or wait—was it
Anthony?), Amadeus focused on what everyone concurred was a pretty banal theme:
the war between cagy, politic, shucking-and-jiving mediocrity, and God-given
genius. And yes, depicting mediocrity as hand-wringing, evilly cackling Salieri
(a hall-of-fame F. Murray Abraham) and giggly, pottymouthed, infantile Mozart
(one-hit-wondrous Thomas Hulce) was cartoonish, simple-minded. And then there
was the matter of Milos Forman’s style: the periwigs, the beautymarked boobies,
the Barry Lyndonian candelabra, the firehose of Metro Goldwyn Mayeresque excess
that the Czech expat spritzed across the stage—er, screen.
